by Liz Evans
She’d made some attempt to brighten the place up, sticking pictures torn from magazines on the walls and a vase of artificial flowers on the drop-down flap at the rear of the hut.
‘We’re not from the council. How long have you been squatting here?’
‘If you’re not council, it’s none of your business.’
The words were aggressive but her voice shook slightly over them. At the first sign of opposition, she’d crumble. She moved forward slightly into the light. It showed up a thin face framed by long, straggling mousy hair.
‘Needs a wash,’ she said unexpectedly, pushing it behind her ears. ‘It’s a mess.’
‘It’s fine,’ we both lied in unison. And took the opportunity of girlish closeness to introduce ourselves.
‘I’m Mickey.’ She gave us a cautious smile. ‘You really not council?’
‘Honest. We’re just looking for someone.’ Once again I went into the Henry and his girlfriend routine.
She moved a little nearer the door; showing up the patches of red and peeling sunburn on her cheekbones and nose. ‘I ’ave seen the man. Couple of times. He’s got a big black dog.
We had a dog like that when I was little but my mum’s bloke had him put down. I’ve never seen a girl, though.’
Venturing right out, she shielded her eyes against the increasing glare from the sea. ‘Looks like it’s gonna be all right. Be able to sit on the beach all day. Brilliant.’
She was like a kid looking forward to a treat.
‘How long have you been ...?’ I nodded towards the chalet.
‘Since Easter. It’s just temporary. Till we find a place to stop for real.’
We’d all been looking out at the ocean, so we failed to see the bloke until he slid into the scene.
It was like watching one of those old-fashioned slide projectors. One minute the frame was filled with grey spray, creamy rollers, ochre sand, gulls still buff in their juvenile feathers, and blue-painted iron railings, then suddenly a black apparition appeared stage right.
It took a second to register that the fluid movement was due to the canary-yellow roller-blades. The rest of him was funereal black: jeans; short-sleeved T-shirt; studded belt; sunglasses; spiky hair. He braked suddenly in front of us; close enough for it to start to feel like intimidation.
‘What’ya know, Mickey?’
‘They’re asking about the blind bloke with the dog, Figgy. You ain’t seen a girl with him, have you?’
‘No. Why?’
He was sliding back and forth on the blades as he spoke, the movement setting up a sloshing in the kettle he was holding. I guessed they probably used the public loos for washing and water supplies.
‘Because I’m trying to find her,’ I informed him. ‘But if you can’t help, we’ll be off. Bye.’
‘Byeeeee ...’ He gave us a mock bow.
Life on the promenade was hotting up. The dog walkers were out in force now, trying to beat the eight a.m. ban on exercising them on the sands. Once again we clocked up several recognitions of Henry and zilch on K.
‘Looks like you’re in for a solitary work-out come Monday,’ Annie said as we rounded the final bend and the snack bar and beach of West Bay came into sight.
I opened my mouth to broach the subject of food and got trumped by a loud ‘Yo! What’ya know, girls!’ from behind.
Figgy arrived at full tilt and circled us like an Apache warrior on speed who’d just found the wagon train. We both pointedly ignored him and kept on jogging.
‘Heh, do I detect hostility here? Don’t you want to know about the bird with the blind wrinkly?’
‘Thought you didn’t know anything about her?’
‘Knowing is relative, ain’t it ...?’ He swung in front and skated backwards. ‘Thing is, couldn’t say anything in front of Mickey. See, she was kind of a babe, that bird. And Mickey gets wound up if I talk up other birds.’ He stopped backpedalling and leant his elbows on the promenade railings. ‘Information’s worth money, ain’t it?’
‘Is it?’
‘I reckon. I mean, I got it. You want it. Basic economics. Cost you fifty.’
‘Dream on, Figgy.’
Annie and I moved off. He skated in front of us and drooped himself over the railings again. ‘So give us a figure.’
‘Two quid.’
We finally settled on ten. ‘Give us a sample of what we’re buying. For good faith. How tall was she? About my height?’ ‘Tall?’
The question seemed to surprise him. He looked me up and down.
‘No, tad shorter, I’d say.’
At least it looked like we were discussing the right woman. ‘What about her age?’
‘What about my cash?’
I indicated my sweatshirt and pants. ‘I don’t carry money in this outfit, Figgy. I’ll owe you.’
‘Now you’re in dreamland.’
Simultaneously we both looked at Annie. With a heavy sigh she balanced her trainer on the railings, unlaced it and pulled out a ten-pound note.
Figgy held out eager fingers. I dangled the note just out of reach. ‘The girl. When did you see her?’
‘About a week after Mickey and I came here. She and the wrinkly were on one of them bench seats under the cliffs. Just past our place.’
A reminiscent smile played round his mouth. ‘She had these little pink shorts on. Legs went on up to her throat. Don’t know about the ...’ He cupped his hands over his chest. ‘Had a baggy jumper on.’
‘Was she wearing anything else?’
‘Trainers.’
‘And?’ I twitched the note further out of reach.
‘You mean the MP3 player?’
It sounded like we’d got the right girl all right. I asked him how old she was.
‘Mid-twenties, I guess.’
‘Dark, fair, redhead?’
‘Dark. About down to here ...’ He touched his shoulder blades. ‘She had it pulled back. You birds shouldn’t do that ... it’s more of a turn-on all kind of loose, like.’
He looked pointedly at my own blonde hair which I wore short and in a through-a-hedge-backwards style which I’d evolved with the help of a pair of nail scissors.
Rolling forward, he twitched the note from my fingers. ‘Interview over, girls.’
He glided back the way he’d come. Ten feet away, he spun round and shouted: ‘Yo, girls. Want her address?’
‘Slip you her telephone number too, did she, Figgy?’ I mocked.
‘Didn’t ask. Saw her coming out of a place once, though. Cost you twenty.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Annie said in response to my pleading look. ‘I’m strictly a one-shoe girl.’
‘I’ll get back to you.’
‘Looking forward to it.’
Figgy wheeled and glided away with easy strokes.
‘Do you think he’s for real? Does he really have an address?’ I said doubtfully as we followed him at a slow amble.
‘An address, yes. The address ... who knows? Can you get the twenty?’
I was off-guard. I admitted to having a cache of readies at the office.
‘Great. See to it you put my tenner under my door.’
‘Aren’t you coming back?’
‘No point. I’ve got the files I need at home. I’ve a bit of washing and pressing to do before I pack. And then I’ll drive up tomorrow. Miss the Monday-morning traffic.’
‘Where you heading?’
‘Bradford first, then Leeds. Then Leicester. After that I’ll touch base here and head out for a couple of candidates with West Country addresses.’
We’d reached the chalets again. A couple more were open now; legitimately this time, judging by the deckchairs outside.
Figgy and Mickey’s navy-blue home was closed and (ostensibly) padlocked, but we glimpsed the tops of their heads leaning back against the promenade wall on the beach below. The smell of hot baked beans drifted up to mingle with the sharp tang of newly exposed seaweed left by the now-retreating tide.
Annie’s stomach growled again.
‘Fancy cheating and having a fry-up?’ I suggested.
‘No thank you. If I’m going to do something I like to do it properly.’
This was true. Resolute could be Annie’s middle name. In fact, for all I knew, it was her middle name - given her parents’ penchant for saddling their children with odd Christian names in order to add a smidgen of originality to their boring surname. Annie’s full name was Anchoret and her brother Zeb had been blessed with Zebedee.
We parted at the foot of the steps beyond the beach cafe. Annie’s place lay over the other side of town, but I could cut through the side streets from here to the office.
I half expected to find someone else in, since none of us worked what you might call regular hours; but the front door was double-locked. Disabling the bleeping alarm, I ambled upstairs, opened my filing cabinet and retrieved the plastic package of bank notes I’d stuck to the back of one of the sliding drawers.
I put Annie’s tenner under the door in an envelope (well, it was going on expenses anyway). After that I’d intended to get myself some breakfast then track down Figgy, but an angry crash and cough from the radiator on the landing caught my attention.
I felt the painted metal. It was red-hot. Brilliant! Vetch the Letch had forgotten to turn off the automatic timing on the boiler for the weekend. Which meant that the tank was currently full of hot water. It seemed a pity to waste it. Taking a towel and shower gel from my locker, I entered the third room on the top landing.
When Vetch had inherited this former boarding house from his gran, he’d had most of the rooms converted for office use, but this bathroom had survived the decorators for some reason. It still bore the ancient linoleum, free-standing tub, copper piping and green algae from the days when Granny had driven weekly boarders out to huddle on freezing beaches until she let them back in at six o’clock prompt for high tea.
Filling the tub to the top, I lazily relaxed and read the ancient notice left behind by Granny Vetch, informing me:
Baths are to be taken between four and six o’clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays only.
An additional is. 6p. to be paid in advance for each bath taken.
‘And a bargain at half the price, Vetch,’ I informed my absent boss. Lathering gel into my hair, I used my coffee mug to bail rinsing water over it and then snuggled back down again to twiddle taps with my toes, practise tightening my stomach muscles, blow ripples across the sudsy water and generally hang out my meeting with Figgy until I figured he’d be sweating on whether he was going to get my twenty pounds or not.
Eventually I got bored and heaved myself out. Dragging my fingers through my hair, which was already more or less dry, I pulled my tracksuit on again, gathered up my bits and pieces, sauntered back to my office - and stopped dead.
A total stranger was rifling through my desk drawers.
CHAPTER 4
‘How the hell did you get in?’
‘Through the door, natch,’ my visitor said, swinging her boots off the desk. ‘How do you think?’
‘I mean how did you get into the building?’
‘So do I. I opened the front door and walked in. It’s not difficult, I’ve been able to do it ever since I was three years old.’
For about thirteen years then, I guessed, putting her at sixteen going on twenty-five.
I recalled opening up but I’d obviously forgotten to lock up behind me, hadn’t I?
‘You a detective?’ She sounded doubtful.
‘Yes. Why? Don’t I look like one?’
‘Not really. I sort of thought you’d be in leather jeans and jacket, with this real mean attitude. And maybe a gun.’
At least she hadn’t said I thought you’d be a man. I started to like her, despite her desk-rifling activities.
‘I thought perhaps you were the cleaner.’
I went right off her again. ‘Do you mind if I get to my seat? Snoopers usually take the other chair.’
She didn’t seem at all abashed. Sliding the drawers shut, she stood up. ‘I wasn’t snooping. I just got bored waiting for you. You ought to have magazines for customers to read. Like the dentist.’
‘How’d you know this was my office?’ I asked, reclaiming my place.
‘Other doors were all locked, natch.’
Thank heavens for that, I breathed silently.
‘I heard you splashing around in there. I didn’t knock ’cos it really pisses me off when they interrupt me in the bath.’ It did me too. I started to like her again.
‘So what can I do for you ... er ... We haven’t done names, have we?’
‘You’re G. Smith. It’s painted on the door. What’s the G for?’
‘Grace.’
She’d had to fetch the client’s chair from the other side of the office. It gave me a chance for a quick stock-taking.
About five three. Bright-orange Lycra top over a bust-line I’d have killed for; short blue denim skirt, denim jacket and bright-blue Doc Martens in a crocodile-skin pattern.
Her face was round and would probably sag in later life, but at present it was all peachy skin, red lips and big brown eyes with long curling lashes beneath a liberal coating of make-up. She wore her chestnut hair as short as mine, but it lay in shiny wisps which said ‘ridiculously expensive stylist’ rather than ‘blunt nail scissors’.
And somehow I had the feeling that the over-large gold hoop earrings had genuine hallmarks and the flash trash watch probably hadn’t cost less than three figures.
‘So what do I call you?’ I asked.
‘Bone.’
‘What?’
‘Bone. You know, like T-bone, jaw-bone ...’
‘Funny bone?’
‘Yes. That’s it.’
‘I can’t call you that.’
‘Why not? Everyone else does. What should I call you? Smithie?’
For years I’d been trying to persuade people to call me Smithie, and they’d all persisted in addressing me as Grace. Now I’d finally got a client who was going to play ball, it suddenly sounded incredibly childish.
‘Let’s stick to Grace. So what can I do for you, er ... Bone?’
‘I want you to find my boyfriend.’
Two missing persons in two days! Maybe the budget cuts in the police service were beginning to bite already.
A nasty thought occurred to me.
‘Of course I know what he looks like!’ Bone snapped in answer to my enquiry. ‘What do you think we did - got it together in a dark room?’
She dragged her shoulder bag round on to her midriff and unzipped an inner compartment. ‘There! That’s him.’
It was a strip from a photo booth. Nobody ever looks like the smiling models displayed on the outside of those machines. This bloke was startled in the first shot; grinning inanely in the second; and attempting to eyeball the camera with a macho sneer in three and four.
‘Well bad, eh?’
I nearly took this as a comment on his behaviour. He had a Romany darkness which in past times had tended to be associated with deflowered virgins and naked romps on the moors. Then I saw Bone’s besotted face and realised this translated as: I fancy his looks something rotten.
I pulled a pad from the drawer. ‘OK. What’s his name?’
‘Tom Skerries.’
‘Address?’
‘I don’t know. Anyway, he’s probably moved.’
‘Why?’
‘He was going to leave his wife. He said she was becoming a real drag.’
I looked at her. She was sitting with her knees pressed together, her lower legs splayed and the boots turned in at a ninety-degree angle. Her face was calm and untroubled. ‘Didn’t it bother you? That he was married?’
‘No. Why should it? He wasn’t married to me, was he?’ That was rather my point, but it was plainly not one that Bone even recognised, let alone entertained.
‘So how long have you and Tom been an item?’
She frowned and delved into
her bag again. I wondered if she needed a diary to remind her when she and Mr Wonderful had first connected. Instead a packet and disposable lighter appeared.
‘Smoke?’
‘No thanks.’
She lit one and leant back, blowing a stream of smoke into the air, and frowning slightly. I think I was supposed to understand that she had so many fanciable blokes beating a path to her door that it was hard for her to remember when Tom had first joined the crowd.
I wasn’t fooled. I’d have bet money that she could remember the exact instant she’d first laid eyes - and whatever else - on Mrs Skerries’ husband.
‘When was the big gale? That tanker nearly got blown into the beach,’ Bone finally said.
‘Beginning of February.’
‘It would be about two weeks after that, I guess. See, the King Charles Oak blew down, took most of the wall with it.’ I didn’t really see the connection, but I asked her if this was at home.
‘No.’ She expelled another cloud of smoke. ‘School. St Aggie’s.’
Well, I’d been right about there being money in the family. St Agatha’s was an exclusive (and expensive) school that took little ‘gels’ from the Pony Club when they were seven and regurgitated them as fully paid-up Sloane Rangers with the telephone number of Harvey Nichols engraved on their souls at eighteen.
‘So what’s this wall got to do with Tom?’
‘He came to put it back. Not the original one, natch. It was ancient. Queen Elizabeth the First slept on top of it or something. The school’s been trying to get rid of it for aeons but it had some preservation order on it.’
‘So it was a lucky break when the tree fell on it?’
The slightly bored been-there-done-that expression vanished for a fraction of an instant. She giggled and suddenly looked a lot prettier. ‘I’ll say. Goldie was practically dancing around the grounds.’
‘Goldie?’
‘Ms Goldfinch. The headmistress. Anyway, the next week she’s got the Health and Safety people round to say that section’s dangerous and could fall on someone so they have to pull it down. And once they get started, well - totally amazing - the shockwaves somehow loosened all the other bricks, so the whole wall has to come down and a nice new one goes up.’ The smile lit her face again. ‘Natch it’s three feet higher than the old one. As if that’s going to stop us bunking out at night.’